Managing Co-reference on the Semantic Web

Co-reference resolution, or the determination of ‘equivalent’ URIs referring to the same concept or entity, is a significant hurdle to overcome in the realisation of large scale Semantic Web applications. However, it has only recently gained the attention of research communities in the Semantic Web context, and while activities are now underway in identifying co-referent or conflated URIs, little consideration has been given to tools and techniques for storing, manipulating, and reusing co-reference information. This paper provides an overview of the specification, implementation, interactions and experiences in using the Co-reference Resolution Service (CRS)to facilitate rigorous management of URI co-reference data, and enable interoperation between multiple Linked Open Data sources. Comparisons are made throughout the paper contrasting the differences in the way the CRS manages multiple URIs for the same resource with the emerging practice of using owl:sameAs to identify duplicate URIs. The advantages and benefits that have been gained from deploying the CRS on a site with multiple Linked Data repositories are also highlighted